About me

This site is mainly intended as a way to keep in touch with friends and family in Canada and elsewhere while I’m off wandering the world from one country to the next.

I’m a software developer who’s been fascinated by computers since I was a kid. I wrote my first lines of BASIC and 6502 assembly on a Canadian knock-off Apple II+ clone made by Apco, dutifully copying source listings line-by-line from Compute! magazine. Working my way up through a Laser Turbo XT and a 286, I finally landed on a 386 DX clocking in at a whopping 33 MHz. It was on this machine that I first installed Linux from a stack of 3.5" floppies and learned to code in Pascal and C. A couple years later, sometime in the mid-90s, some classmates convinced me I should check out FreeBSD, and because I’m used to it, but also out of sheer laziness, I’ve been using it as my main home setup pretty much ever since.

I headed off to university sometime in the early 90s. Seven years later, after wandering aimlessly from faculty to faculty through Chemistry, Physics & Astronomy, Japanese, and Electrical and Computer engineering programmes, I decided enough was enough, grabbed my B.Eng., and booted myself out the door and into the world.

Initially, I moved south of the border to spend a couple years in California working on AutoCAD at Autodesk. Deciding that this wasn’t south-of-the-border enough, I packed my bags and headed to Mérida, México, which sits neatly within the borders of the Chicxulub crater where the asteroid that caused the Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction event landed. I spent the year writing point-of-sale software for a local art gallery, doing some travelling, and doing some teaching on the side.

A year later, as my visa neared its end, I started wandering my way back to Canada via Cuba, Belize, Guatemala, and Honduras before remembering which way was north and zig-zagging my way slowly back home on third-class buses.

A couple years later, after some more hacking on 3D CAD software, I picked up my few possessions and moved to Tokyo, Japan, where I met my wife, learned to speak, read, and write Japanese, got married, and had kids. I’ve spent the time since working on a variety of projects ranging from equities trading systems, the Dart programming language, the Flutter app SDK, and the Fuchsia operating system. I currently work on open source software at Google.

You can drop me a line anytime at chris@bracken.jp (English, français, 日本語)